I love Lisps, and I have the same problem. You really have to learn to approach reading code in a different way. Lisp (and Haskell, say) are so information-dense that you just have to look closely at every word to understand what is going on, as opposed to C or Python where you can glance at a "paragraph" of code and get a decent sense of what it is doing , because it is basically executing a set of statements in order. Probably the closest you get to this dense unpacking issue in Python is when reading a gnarly list comprehension.

The upside is that the code actually is smaller, so you have to read less of it. But I agree that it is fatiguing to read dense code that you can't really skim.